Study of the transmission line for Israeli THz free-electron radiation source

This article establishes a very important part of the transmission line (TL) design of the novel 6 MeV compact particle accelerator. Practically, the entire new array of particle accelerators has been designed and is in the final stages of construction at the Ariel University. Except for a novel hybrid photo-cathode electron gun, which has been developed and built in University of California, Los Angeles's Laboratory, it was commissioned at The Schlesinger Family Center for Compact Accelerators, Radiation Sources and Applications (free electron laser) as a part of an ongoing collaboration between the two universities. In this work, we have built a complete simulator for the analysis and propagation of terahertz pulses through the TL, which meets our specific requirements with a high level of flexibility. To simulate the propagation of an output wave packet of the source through the TL quasi-optical system, the original wave packet is decomposed in terms of free-space Hermite–Gaussian basis while the following transformations of the wave packet is described by the transfer matrices technique. Total radiation losses and spectral properties of the TL transfer are analyzed.